BRIDGEPORT – The Volunteer Income Tax Assistance program, which provides free tax preparation for eligible families, will kick off the new tax season with an opening event on Friday, Jan. 27, at Housatonic Community College.

Under the program, volunteers are trained by the Internal Revenue Service to prepare income tax returns for households earning less than $50,000. HCC students typically participate in the program.

Highlighting Friday’s program will be addresses by HCC President Anita T. Gliniecki; Bridgeport Mayor Bill Finch; Peter Yazbak, outreach coordinator for Cong. Jim Himes; IRS senior tax specialist Ron Peruzzi and Merle Berke-Schlessel, president and CEO of the United Way of Coastal Fairfield County.

The event begins at 1 p.m. in the Atrium in Lafayette Hall. Free parking is available in the Housatonic Garage, 900 Lafayette Blvd in downtown Bridgeport.

Donna M. Curran, director of communications, said that along with free admission, the open house will feature a reception and announcements regarding 2012 special events.

Several local and state officials also are expected to attend, she added.

The museum, which now focuses on science and technology, was opened on Jan. 21, 1962, as the Museum of Art, Science and Industry.

The Discovery Museum and Planetarium is at 4450 Park Ave., Bridgeport. For additional information, call 203-372-3521 or visit www.discoverymuseum.org

The event is set to begin Monday at 8:30 a.m. at Mount Aery Baptist Church, 73 Frank St.

Peters, the retired leader of the New Hope Baptist Church in Denver, was in the thick of the Civil Rights Movement of the late 1950s and the 1960s. He was at the founding meeting in 1957 of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and he worked directly with King during the marches in Albany, Ga., and in Selma and Birmingham, Ala. He also participated in the March on Washington on Aug. 28, 1963, when King delivered his “I Have a Dream’’ speech.

Peters was pastor of East End Baptist Church in Bridgeport from 1960 to 1973.

The two-hour celebration at Mount Aery usually attracts more than 600 people, including a number of VIPs from the region.

It will be followed at 10:30 a.m. by a community breakfast in the lower level of the church. Tickets for the breakfast are s $12 for adults and $7 for youth 17 and under. Tickets may be purchased at Ms. Thelma’s Restaurant, 140 Fairfield Ave., or by calling 203-526-8086. There will also be a coat drive during the event.

Daniel Mills, 32, was pulled over by State Police about 9:30 p.m., while heading north near Exit 33. He left his car and started running, State Police said. Stratford Police were called in to assist in the chase.

Once caught, Mills was charged with possession of narcotics, sale of drugs and possession of drug paraphernalia, as well as interfering with officers, disobeying officers, reckless driving and failure to display license plates.

Held on $250,000 bond, Mills appeared Tuesday in Bridgeport Superior Court.

Smile Dental Centers owner, Dr. Bruce Sofferman, along with his wife Deborah Sofferman and their daughter Sophia Sofferman will be wearing traditional Pilgrim and Native American costumes and joined by a turkey mascot as they attempt to flag down drivers to drop off turkeys and fixings from 7 to 10 a.m. in Oxford on Wednesday, Nov. 16. at 318 Oxford Road (Route 67) and again on Thursday Nov. 17, from 7 to 10 a.m. at the R.D. Scinto Corporate Park, located at One Corporate Drive in Shelton.

Dr. Sofferman’s Smile Dental Centers at 318 Oxford Road in Oxford and 61 Elizabeth Street in Derby will also be collecting frozen turkeys and fixings all week during regular business hours Monday through Friday from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. Nov. 14-18.

The final drive location will be collecting only frozen turkeys on Sat., Nov. 19 from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. in Seymour. The 8th Grade Gold Team from Seymour Middle School is again sponsoring this drop off location at 211 Mountain Road.

A list of specific food items needed for the frozen turkey drive is at the end of the release or visit www.actspooner.org for more details.

Smile Dental Centers will be accepting frozen turkeys and the fixings on:

Monday – Friday, Nov. 14 – 18 from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m.
318 Oxford Road (Route 67) in Oxford and

61 Elizabeth Street in Derby

R.D. Scinto Corporate Park will be accepting frozen turkeys and the fixings on:

Thursday, Nov. 17 from 7 a.m. to 10 a.m.

One Corporate Drive in Shelton, in the parking lot of the Scinto Towers

Seymour Middle School, accepting only frozen turkeys

Saturday, Nov. 19 from 9 a.m. – 3 p.m.

The 8^th Grade Gold Team, 211 Mountain Road in Seymour

If these dates and times are not convenient, you may also drop food items at the Spooner House, 30 Todd Road in Shelton, Monday through Friday from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. and Saturdays from 1 to 5 p.m. Contact:  tvellucci@actspooner.org or 203-225-0453.

Admission is free for job seekers. Those attending will need to bring resumes and be ready for on the spot interviews. Individuals are urged to pre-register on Goodwill’s web site at www.goodwillwct.org to ensure that they get to meet as many employers as possible.

Goodwill operates Career Centers to offer job seekers free access to employment resources that will help them to become gainfully employed or to move upward in their career. Resources offered include help with resumes and cover letters, access to local job postings, computers and the Internet, referrals to education and community support and job focused workshops.

They’re the people who give rides to the polls on election day, and on Tuesday, dozens found themselves driving all over the city to pick up the home bound for a ride to the polls.

Just about all of them work for either the campaigns of incumbent Mayor Bill Finch, or his challenger, Mary Jane Foster.

“I’ve given about 10 rides so far,” said Bonnie Roach, who had just dropped off an elderly voter in front on Longfellow School on the city’s West End at about noon. “For many of them is’s a confusing day for them. Unless you say to them, ‘Do you know what today is?’ many of them don’t get it. But once you talk to them for five minutes, they’re on board with the election.”

Roach, a Finch supporter, said that she was volunteering her time, and her car expenses. “Look, I’m on ‘E’ –– I gotta get some gas.”

It was a long day for Finch supporter and former Bridgeport City Council member Mike Marella.

“I started at seven o’clock,” he said after dropping off a voter at the JFK Campus on the East End, “I’ll be doing this until eight. They wanted to pay me, but I’m, doing this because I’m an old-time politician.”

Marella is in charge of the Bridgeport Police Athletic League.

The JFK Campus, which includes the High Horizons and Multicultural magnet schools, has a long driveway and it’s at the end of Palisade Avenue, so most of those voting there need rides if they don’t have their own cars.

Driver Odalis Inoa, 19, another Finch supporter, said that he was driving exclusively to the JFK Campus. “They gave me a full tank of gas. And it’ll look good on my resume.”

For Foster booster Terry Conroy, now of Stamford, helping out her campaign was an assignment that he couldn’t turn down.

“I was employed by Mary Jane at one time, and I was on the on-filed announcer for a season,” he said after dropping of a voter in front of Harding High School. “I was Capt. L.I. Sounder for a season. I met my wife at a game, so Mary Jane will; always have a place in my heart, because she’s at least partly responsible for hooking me up with my wife.”

You can reach John Burgeson at 203-330-6403 or by email at jburgeson@ctpost.com. Follow twitter.com/johnburgeson.

NEW HAVEN – Yale School of Public Health researchers, in collaboration with Russian scientists, have discovered a new tick-borne bacterium that might be causing disease in the United States and elsewhere.

This new disease is caused by a spirochete bacterium called Borrelia miyamotoi, which is distantly related to Borrelia burgdorferi, the bacterium that causes Lyme disease. Yale professor of epidemiology Durland Fish and colleagues found this new spirochete, previously known only from ticks in Japan, in deer ticks in Connecticut in 2001, but did not know if it caused disease in humans.

Spirochetes are bacteria look like a coiled telephone cord under the microscope. They also cause syphilis, but some are beneficial. They break down cellulose in the digestive tracts of ruminants, for example. Mollusks rely on them, too.

Borrelia miyamotoi has been found in all tick species that transmit Lyme disease throughout the United States and Europe. By collaborating with a medical team studying tick-borne diseases in Russia, Yale researchers were able to compare disease symptoms in patients infected by the new spirochete in Russia with those having Lyme disease in the United States.

The new disease is characterized by high fever, which relapses without treatment and may be confused with Lyme disease. There are currently no diagnostic tests available, but Yale researchers have recently received a grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to develop a diagnostic test procedure to look for cases of this new disease in the United States.

“This is the first time we will have a chance to identify a new tick-borne disease in the United States based upon evidence that the agent occurs in ticks,” said Fish, co-author of the paper and co-investigator on the NIH grant along with Peter Krause, a senior research scientist in the Division of Epidemiology of Microbial Diseases.

They report finding B. miyamotoi in about 2 percent of the deer ticks in the Northeast and Upper Midwest and have been conducting experiments with mice in the laboratory that become infected when fed upon by deer ticks. Because bites from deer ticks cause more than 25,000 cases of Lyme disease each year, according to the CDC, the Yale team is gearing up to determine if there is any illness that is caused by B. miyamotoi infection in the United States.

Their findings appear in the journal Emerging Infectious Diseases.

The Fairfield Museum and History Center announced this morning that it will extend the run of its current exhibit in memory of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on America that killed nearly 3,000.

The exhibition was to have closed on Sunday, Sept. 18, but museum officials said today that the show is “not coming down now until after 4 p.m. on Wednesday, Sept. 21, because “is has been so well attended and received.”

Admission to the museum is free during the run of the exhibit. Featured in the show are several photographs taken at Ground Zero by the renowned Westport photographer Stephen Wilkes shortly after two commercial airliners were crashed by terrorists into the World Trade Center’s Twin Towers, destroying them both.   

The museum presents exhibitions on the history of the Greater Bridgeport area, as well as topics of general interest to the region. It is open Monday through Friday from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., weekends noon to 4 p.m. For additional information: www.fairfieldhs.org; 203-259-1598.

Back on May 31, employees of the motel on Woodmont Road were stunned to discover that one of their guests had stolen a room air conditioner. And, to hide the crime, the suspect installed his own broken room air conditioner in its place.

He also checked out without paying his bill. Motel employees told police that they were out $710.

Police say that they have arrested Michael Sheftz, 50, of Jackson Avenue, Stratford, and charged him with fifth-degree larceny for swapping out the hotel’s air conditioner for his own. He was discovered after he was pulled over on Milford Point Road for driving without proper insurance and driving a vehicle with canceled registration.

He was released on $2,500, and he’s scheduled to appear in court on Sept. 20.